What exactly are they claiming?

Let’s just take this claim apart a bit. Firstly, it claims that scientists
will be able to do something. Therefore, they have not done what they’re
claiming yet, which in this context implies that they cannot do it yet.
To reiterate this, Jack Szostak plainly says, ‘We [the scientists] aren’t
smart enough to design things’. Thus, artificial life is something that current
human understanding and technology cannot produce. Given the highly complex technology
that humans are currently capable of manufacturing, this implies that what they’re
trying to make is of an incredibly high class of technology.

Another point implicit in the claim, but maybe not as obvious, is that they are
modifying the word ‘life’ with adjectives such as ‘artificial’.
Such adjectives imply that they are copying a previously arranged assembly and not
creating something completely new. They do not imply that they are improving on
the current design. Szostak blatantly said we can’t do that. Furthermore,
Mark Bedau, chief operating officer of ProtoLife of Venice, Italy, said,

‘When these things are created, they’re going to be so weak, it’ll
be a huge achievement if you can keep them alive for an hour in the lab
[emphasis added].’

Therefore, even if they created something, it will be vastly inferior to the ‘real’
or ‘natural’ model for life. Positively, ‘real’ or ‘natural’
life is so superior to our current technology that comparisons are a joke.

Life without God?

Bedau stated, ‘Creating protocells has the potential to shed new light on
our place in the universe. This will remove one of the few fundamental mysteries
about creation in the universe and our role.’ How do they propose creating
artificial life will answer these profound philosophical questions? From the tone
of the rest of the article, they seem to think it will prove life made itself. Szostak
commented, ‘We aren't smart enough to design things, we just let evolution
do the hard work and then we figure out what happened.’ Hang on, just what
does that mean—that they’ll assemble the junkyard and let the tornado
do the rest? Just one problem, how does life ‘evolve’ from non-life?
Any form of selection is out of the question because of what we could call ‘Dawkins’
Dilemma’:

‘The theory of the blind watchmaker is extremely powerful given that we are
allowed to assume replication and hence cumulative selection. But if replication
needs complex machinery, since the only way we know for complex machinery ultimately
to come into existence is cumulative selection, we have a problem
[emphasis added].’2

‘In order to have natural selection, you have to have self-reproduction or
self-replication and at least two distinct self-replicating units or entities [therefore]
Prebiological natural selection is a contradiction of terms [emphasis
added].’

The fundamental problem is that there are a number of steps that must be
in place for life to occur, only one of which is complex machinery for replication.
These steps cannot arise naturalistically because each step has more information
than the sum of the previous steps.3
Moreover, natural chemistry and physics work against producing life, not for it,
which leaves us with an ‘unbridgeable abyss’ between naturalistic chemistry
and life (See Q and A:
Origin of Life).4

Evolution-of-the-gaps

Should they actually achieve this goal, what does it mean for creation/evolution?
Rather than proving evolution, it is further evidence that life requires
a designer and can’t be the result of evolution. In any event, the goal is
obviously still some way away given Szostak’s classic admission: ‘We
aren't smart enough to design things, we just let evolution do the hard work and
then we figure out what happened.’

It doesn’t say much for ‘evolved human intelligence’ if it can’t
compete with a mindless process!

Note that in saying this, Szostak is guilty of doing the very thing that evolutionists
criticize creationists of doing, i.e., invoking a ‘god-of-the-gaps’
(i.e. seeking ‘god’ in the gaps in our knowledge.5 For evolutionists, their ‘god’ in this
case is ‘evolution’.) Even granting this baseless accusation, at least
the biblical God is far smarter than us who ‘aren’t smart enough to
design things’, whereas evolution is a completely blind and mindless process.
It doesn’t say much for ‘evolved human intelligence’ if it can’t
compete with a mindless process!

In any case, informed creationists falsely accused of invoking a ‘god-of-the-gaps’
mentality have rightly responded by pointing out that which the evolutionists fail
to realize—that the design argument is based on what we do know and
is clearly perceivable, unless we willingly blind ourselves to it (Romans 1:20, 2 Peter 3:5–6).6

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